Can’t we all agree: Regardless of your position on LGBTQ issues drag queens reading to toddlers is ridiculous?

Lil Miss Hot Mess reads to children during Drag Queen Story Hour at the public library in Brooklyn, N.Y. May 13, 2017. [Photo Credit: AP Photo | Mary Altaffer]

In today’s, “What in the world are they thinking?” we have the Drag Queens Reading Hour in Mobile coming up. Organizers with Rainbow Mobile, a LGBTQ rights group, is hosting the event. Though their original invitation encourages parents with children as young as three years old to come and hear a drag queen read at story time, there are parents asking if they can bring children even younger than three.

I don’t care what your stance on alternative lifestyles is, this is absurd. The Centers for Disease Control hosts a website on developmental milestones. At the age of 4 children often still can’t tell real from make-believe. How does introducing them to a drag queen do anything but confuse them about what to expect in society?

In a society where drag queens’ main purpose historically has been to promote a type of personality within the homosexual community (see below study for more on that.) By the age of 5children are just starting to understand gender, for the purposes of staying on topic I won’t go into my position on the national transgender movement among young kids, except to say I don’t believe science backs up the emotional and developmental ability of young children or early teens to choose their gender identity.

Life is already confusing enough to children who are learning basic life skills and basic facts about the world around them why add to it? How is that healthy for the child? I get it if your personal agenda as an adult is to support the LGBTQ community and you want to teach tolerance and acceptance to your children, but to force it upon them before they understand the basics is just plain wrong. To confuse them with the idea that drag queens, or men dressing as women with full hair and makeup, is normal in conventional society is asinine. Cross-dressing is not normal for adult males. Period. We should not raise kids to think something that only happens rarely is the norm.

For the purposes of this discussion and for my own general knowledge I spend some time doing research on drag queens. One of the most detailed studies I could find on their lifestyle was published last year in the journal of Evolutionary Psychology (April-June 2017: 1–14). Studying, A Natural History of the Drag Queen Phenomenon Michael Moncrieff and Pierre Lienard noted a few point I think are relevant for this discussion:

Drag queens, or female impersonators, differ from transsexuals and individuals with transvestic fetishisms1 in that they are gay individuals who don female clothing with the explicit goal of performing in front of audiences (Schacht, 2000).

Again, if you’re a progressive parent, I can understand wanting to teach your worldview to your child but that should be done in a way that’s developmentally appropriate. Reading the history and facts about drag queens how can anyone say that a child should be exposed to such a sexually charged subject?

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